The Three Character Classic, the traditional primer for children, says: “To raise without teaching is the father’s fault. To teach without strictness is the teacher’s laziness.” (养不教，父之过。教不严，师之惰) A few lines later it adds: “Jade that is not carved does not become a vessel. A person who does not study does not know what is right.” (玉不琢，不成器。人不学，不知义)
Love and Hard Work
Confucius said: “If one loves someone, can one fail to make him work hard? If one is loyal to someone, can one fail to instruct him?” (爱之，能勿劳乎？忠焉，能勿诲乎？) The line is in the Analects.
The Vocabulary of Strictness
恨铁不成钢 To hate iron for not becoming steel. To hold high hopes for someone and to resent that the person does not improve.
刀子嘴豆腐心 A mouth like a knife, a heart like tofu. Sharp in speech but kind at heart.
望子成龙 To hope that one’s son becomes a dragon. To hope that one’s children will become outstanding people.
Mencius’s Mother Cuts the Cloth
When the young Mencius came home from his studies, he told his mother that he had made no progress. She took a knife and cut through the cloth on her loom. “Your neglect of study is like my cutting this cloth.” Mencius was afraid. He studied day and night without rest and became a famous scholar.
The Three Character Classic retells the story in six characters: “When the son did not study, she broke off the work at her loom.” (子不学，断机杼)
Fu Lei’s Letters
Fu Lei’s Family Letters (傅雷家书) collects the letters of the translator Fu Lei to his son Fu Cong. In 1965 he wrote: “Loving a child is of course important, but building discipline is just as important. If one pays no attention when the child is a few months old and tightens up at two or three, both adult and child will suffer.”
The site of the China Writers Association describes him as “a stern, conscientious father who did not lack love.” In 2017, the book was added to the recommended reading of the national middle school Chinese textbook. In 2022, another book replaced it in the eighth-grade volume.
The Devil Coach
Yuan Weimin, who coached China’s women’s volleyball team to its first world title, was called “China’s devil coach” (中国的魔鬼教练). At a training camp in Chenzhou in 1979, the gym floor was so rough that wood splinters often cut the players’ skin and shirts.
Beating Is Spurring On
In the old Peking opera training troupes, keban (科班), beatings were part of the training. The actor Tan Xiaozeng recalled that his grandfather described seven years in the troupe as seven years in prison. A beating was usually ten or twenty strokes, “until blood showed.” Yet he also said: “Our beatings were not corporal punishment. They were spurring on.” (我们的挨打不是体罚，是鞭策) “In this trade, without beating, no talent comes out.”
Not every school kept the practice. The director Jiao Juyin abolished corporal punishment at the Chinese opera school he led.
Discipline for Education
The Ministry of Education’s Rules on Educational Discipline in Primary and Secondary Schools, in force since March 1, 2021, define educational discipline as acts by schools and teachers, “based on educational purposes,” to manage, instruct or correct students who break rules, so that they take warning and recognize and correct their mistakes. Article 8 lists the measures a teacher may take on the spot. The first is criticism by name (点名批评).
Strict Management Is Deep Love
“Good cadres are selected, and even more, they are made by management. Strict management is deep love. It is real responsibility toward cadres.” (好干部是选出来的，更是管出来的。严管就是厚爱，是对干部真正负责。) People’s Daily has published the line as a saying of Xi Jinping. The articles do not say when he first said it.